Tag: news

Happy May Day! Workers’ rights are important, and are ignored quite a bit in this capitalistic country (one of the few countries that doesn’t have May Day as a day off for workers… quite ironic.)

Here, it seems, even workers treat other workers like crap. And I don’t think it’s necessarily because they are bad people, but because they’ve been trained to be assholes by this ‘customer is always right’ idea.

Imagine going out to eat, and always being given your food free if you complain and yell about it enough. Imagine getting pulled to the front of the line if you scream and make a fuss. Imagine being apologized to profusely and groveled before if you howl and threaten convincingly enough—this is the state of customer service in America. He who screams and yells the loudest is given the quickest, best service.

It’s not hard to imagine this spreading to other, non-consumer areas of society. After being trained for their entire lives that yelling gets you your way, why shouldn’t someone take this strategy home, and yell at their wife or kids? Or at someone online in an argument? Or any other area of life?

We’ve trained people to be assholes by rewarding them for shitty behavior, at the cost of our workers’ sanity. It has to stop!

No one should be given a free meal for yelling and treating the server like shit, they should be thrown out and banned from the restaurant. They should not get to talk to the supervisor before everyone else in line because they started screaming, they should be thrown out and not allowed back in. People need to learn to behave civilly if they want to be helped and served by another human being.

But until we stop worshiping the dollar above all else, no company will change their ‘customer is always right’ policy–which translated, is really ‘the dollar is always right.’

Even more right than the rights of your workers to be treated like a human being.

Many moons ago, before the summer slung itself haphazard over the shoulders of Britons, and as easily fell away, my friends and I dreamt up a new creative writing magazine. The journey to launch has been an interesting one. Frankly, of course, we have no idea what we’re doing. And I imagine that will be […]

Are the American people okay with this? Each week and month and year that goes by with nothing being done tells me that most are.

Imagine a world in which you can buy a tank at your local car dealership. Imagine in this world, that every month or so some crazy gets their tank on credit with no license or training, and that same day drives through his local neighborhood crushing cars and people and shooting houses until the military can get there to stop him.

Well, that is a lot of death and damage caused all the time, constantly, by crazy or evil or bigoted people getting into tanks.

But, we can’t do anything about that, can we? I need to have my right to buy and drive a tank responsibly if I want to. Not having to be licensed or trained or evaluated in any way when I want to go buy my second or third tank in the future, is much more important to me than making sure only responsible people own tanks. You see, if any kind of control over tank-buying is put in place, everyone might lose their right to own tanks at all!

It’s just something we have to live with, in a free world where everyone can own tanks and drive them in public.

Well you know what? I don’t want to live in a world where everyone can own their own tank, or rocket launcher or bandoleer of grenades. And I don’t want to live in a world where everyone owns a gun.

Call me whatever names you want, call me unpatriotic, call me a liberal snowflake, call me angry or scared or call me fascist or call me socialist. But the less tanks there are, the less crushed cars and destroyed houses there are. The less hand grenades there are, the less explosions there are. The less flame throwers there are, the less house-fires and melted people there are.

The air is filled with smoke. Ashes fall like snow. It’s hotter than it’s ever been. Winds and waters destroy our infrastructure, explode our factories. Is it hubris to think we can do whatever we want and still thrive on this planet? Look to the future. It’s time to change ourselves.

After humans are extinct, birds will be the next to conquer the world with their minds. We’ve already seen that ravens and crows can understand death, solve complex puzzles, and remember human faces–now it seems they can plan for the future at least as well as a human child.

What would a world ruled by birds look like? Will they fill all of humanity’s niches after we’ve gone? What kind of tools would birds invent? Will they discover the secrets of the universe a million years from now?

In this world, augmented reality technology is so advanced, that ‘real’ is up for debate. Anything you see can be altered to look like anything you want. Anything you feel can be altered to feel however you chose. Any video can be faked, any words anyone says can be altered. The majority chooses reality, or individuals can isolate themselves into their own realities. If it is decided by the majority that the color blue does not exist, for example, then blue will be edited from everyone’s vision, removed from all language and recordings. Any individual talking about blue or claiming they see it will just be a crazy outsider, or will have their words muted. The functional reality would be one without the color blue. You would have to learn to live in this reality and accept it, or be a social outcast. The next day, blue might be back in existence and you’d have to go on as if it had always been. The day after, the world may be flat, and all contrary evidence removed…

How would fiction exist in this world when no one knows for sure what is real, and what is ‘real’ today may be false tomorrow? No one reading a fiction story would know if a dragon flying across the sky was supposed to be ordinary or odd, and might expect the rules of the fictional world to completely change from one page to the next.

I went ahead and did it, I got myself a website. It is mainly a fancy looking link to my blog (here) and my Amazon author page, but it also has a few stories available to read. I plan to add a new story up there every month or so, too. I think of it as a sort of portfolio of my writing, a way for stories to be seen other than being lost in the endless posts here.

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Jonas David is a science fiction writer born and raised and living in the Seattle area. His stories have appeared in Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, IGMS and others. Additional writing and info can be found at jonas-david.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @thejonasdavid.